October Launch Party Recap

Back in late January, October launched with a party at Three's Brewing that began with mellow reflection and ended with just enough ridiculousness to make it a real party. Hopefully the site will follow suit and learn from its own inception.

First came the panel. Here were the members of the panel, which were intersectional just as October hopes to reach across the aisle to other walks of life. Meat, beer, baseball, stats – here were the talkers for the evening:

Early on, Stylman said he figured out how to find people with the right skills for an undefined venture by admitting something about himself early on – "I have no skills, so I've become fairly adept at finding people with skills." That self deprecation was a common thread throughout.

Cory Smith / Good Beer HuntingThe panel was mostly laughs, even when the panelists were admitting embarrassing things about themselves. Especially when?

Chris Kaskie talked about having deference to the people making the art that we're talking about, a deference that is sometimes from missing from today's critical writing. That deference was something I found important, because I've always found that the further you drill down into the numbers, the more you find you don't know. Numbers, and critical writing, are no cudgel.

Turley talked about completely new ways to approach the subject at hand, and recalled that the first two hirings at The Meat Hook were a public relations expert and a baker. That helped his company understand better what people wanted out of his company – a compass for turning their vision into a real world thing.

Selver-Kassell remembered the first time she saw Threes and all the questions she had about the space there. How is this going to work? She wondered at first, but going out of her comfort zone helped her find things that were novel in her life and in others.

In all cases, the conversation centered on collaboration and intersection. That conversation is huge for October going forward, and so it was a great way to kick things off.

Of course, the libations were generous, Ian Williams from Battles was spinning good tunes, and eventually there had to be shenanigans. This happened in the form of a misunderstanding between a few of the entities that collaborated on October – one group thought another group was going to get the neon sign that you can see on the event announcement. Then nobody knew where the sign was in the morning, in the aftermath.

We asked Threes for security camera video. We then tried to figure out who was in this video, ostensibly stealing our neon sign.

Even after we knew who had taken the sign –of course a friend, a partner involved in launching October, in the end – we were amazed by how we couldn't recognize him from the security footage. Good luck to all crime fighters out there, it's not easy to do.